Hey! This post is about pesto, and Italy, and we have a trip to Southern Italy coming up in May! We also have two rooms left for France in October, with a discount of $250 per person running all summer! Come with us!
A note: I skipped right over the Weekend Roundup this week because I was travelling back from Indiana and then just kind of forgot to do it…so I am making this week’s paid post available to everyone, free and paid subscribers. But, if you like what you’re reading, why not subscribe? It’s only $8 a month or $80 a year, truly one of the last bargains left in town.
Do you remember the first time you ate pesto? If you’re over fifty, or maybe forty-five and weren’t raised in northwestern Italy, there was definitely a time in your life where pesto wasn’t a given, a known, an unremarkable, standard inclusion in your mind’s foodscape. A time before it was something you didn’t even think about anymore because it was always there, like the tattoo you got at seventeen and by now had virtually forgotten about. Life in the pre-pesto era.
Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, pesto was something new to us kids who grew up in North America, even if we had Italian ancestry (I do not, as you know but am mistaken for Italian quite often) or had travelled to Genoa or some other Italian region known for making thick, herb-and-nut purees to toss over hot pasta. Looking back, did any of the moms of my Long Island Italian friends, with their roots in Calabria, Palermo, Naples or Bari serve us kids bowls of trenette al pesto when we slept over on a Saturday night? Hell, no. It was meatballs and braciole, eggplant and baked ziti. Southern Italian, Italian-American food. Tomatoes, mozz and meat. I loved it, and I think that along with myself, most other Americans just thought that that was Italian food. And it was, it was the cuisine of diaspora, adapted to what was available in the new world, like all immigrant cuisines. You work with whatcha got, and in the case of America, you got a lot of meat and dairy, way more than back home.
But one summer, as I was visiting my father on Fire Island where he was part of a share house, a housemate named Jane who I thought was a super-cool Manhattanite and wanted to be just like, placed a plastic pint container down on the long communal dining table. It had a thick green paste in it that I eyed quizzically and she said to me, “taste it, it’s pesto”
Jane worked as the director of the New York City Greenmarkets, the outdoor farmers’ markets that are now at over one hundred locations throughout the city. The program started in 1976 to bring farmers and people back into the city after decades of population decline and suburban escape. It allowed people to reconnect to NYC’s deep and wide agricultural resources, the hundreds of miles of farms and coast and orchards and pasture, just a few dozen miles outside the city.
This summer day was probably in ‘79 or ‘80, so the markets were only a few years old and I was still five years away from moving into the city to go to college. The whole idea of it struck me as so sophisticated, so urban and cool, I wanted my father to marry her. Or maybe I just wanted to be her. She explained what it was and offered me a taste on a cracker and I swear that was the moment I realized what food could be. I can still remember how herby and green and floral it tasted and what a shock it was to eat something like that. How different it was from anything. Basil in my world was just another dessicated green flake in the cabinet, many years too old and used in making spaghetti sauce. This was a revelation. I always mention it as one of the pivotal moments in my food awakening. The day I saw the green light. I would’ve eaten the entire container but my sister quietly hissed in my ear to stop, it was Jane’s and not ours. I wanted to be Jane and I wanted to eat all of her pesto. She was so cool.
Then, within a few years, pesto was everywhere. It became, along with arugula and Perrier, mockable, derided symbols of the yuppies, the urban professionals who were colonizing the abandoned, run-down neighborhoods and buying up brownstones and lofts. Pesto was everywhere, on everything in the 90’s and trickled up into the mainstream of American supermarkets and restaurants, to forever become just another food we take for granted, bought in refrigerated tubs or made ourselves. As ubiquitous as jarred tomato sauce or blocks of parm. And that’s fine by me, I would slather pesto on everything if I could make enough of it in season. A decade or so after that summer I was living just a few blocks from the Union Square Greenmarket, the original one and one of the largest. I was also just learning to cook and would buy huge bunches of basil (for fifty cents! Now they’re like $4) and make ice cube trays full of pesto, to capture and freeze that summery magic sauce to eat all year long on the way-too-much pasta I used to eat.
Other than at work, or teaching, I hadn’t made it for myself in a long time, to tell the truth, since I don’t really eat much pasta anymore. But that’s been a mistake. Pesto will be made, again and again this summer until the last bunches of basil at the market are rudely bumped by the pumpkins. The little tub I made last week reawakened something in me, a lost love I had forgotten from long ago. But it has served me well on my morning steamed egg, and spread over leftover roast chicken, stirred into yogurt with extra garlic and lemon juice as a sauce for grilled fish, and in honor of Jane, whatever her last name was, the woman who opened my eyes, just eaten on a cracker, on a hot summer’s day, staring out at the tranquil Great South Bay (ok the Hudson river) just like on Fire Island. And as I eat it and remember my moment, my Proustian awakening, the day forty-five years ago when I first tasted summer and was smitten, I say a little thank you to Jane, whoever she was and wherever she is now.
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